Modern debate treats economics as a technical dispute. However, every economic system begins with anthropology. It asks what man is, what freedom means, and how property, work, family, state authority, and scarcity should be understood. These are moral and theological questions.
Catholic social teaching begins not with the state, market or collective, but with the dignity of the human person. “Gaudium et Spes” teaches us that, “the dignity and complete vocation of the human person” must be respected, because “man is the source, the center, and the purpose of all economic and social life.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All” teaches, “The economy should serve people, not the other way around.”
By socialism, I mean ideological collectivism: a system that subordinates persons, families, private property, religion, and civil society to collective or state control. By free enterprise, I mean an order that recognizes business, markets, property, initiative, profit, and creativity, while ordering these elements to law, justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that a system that “subordinates the basic rights of individuals and of groups to the collective organization of production” is contrary to human dignity. It rejects ideologies associated with “communism” or “socialism.”
“The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature,” Pope John Paul II wrote in “Centesimus Annus.” Socialism treats the person as a component within a social organism, subordinating the individual to the state.
Earlier in the 20th century, Pope Pius XI made explicit the incompatibility of Catholicism with these forms of governance, writing, “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist” (“Quadragesimo Anno”) and that “Communism is intrinsically wrong” (“Divini Redemptoris”). Pope Paul VI’s “Octogesima Adveniens” warned that Christians may “idealize” socialism while ignoring its ideologies. A Catholic must care about workers, the poor and solidarity; he may not embrace a “complete and self-sufficient picture of man,” apart from God and the dignity of the human person.
Private property is central to freedom and free markets because it gives persons and families a sphere of responsibility and freedom. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum” teaches the faithful that the labor questions and debates cannot be solved unless “private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable,” and that the law should “induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.”
Work is not merely production; it is personal, familial and spiritual. “Gaudium et Spes” from the Second Vatican Council teaches that labor is superior to other elements of economic life because tools are things, while work comes from the person. Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, “Laborem Exercens,” gives us the principle that work is “for man,” not man “for work.”
The state has duties undoubtedly and the market has limits. Civil society has rights and families have priority. Larger powers should assist, not absorb; regulate, not dominate; protect, not replace.
Rightly ordered free enterprise has a moral advantage because it distributes initiative across persons, families, firms, churches, charities and local communities. “Christifideles Laici” (“Christ’s faithful laity”) is an apostolic exhortation from Pope John Paul II that teaches that lay people live their vocation in family life, social life, professions and occupations, where they sanctify the world from within.
The Catholic position is not a partisan political slogan. Socialism fails because it assigns to the state powers that belong first to persons, families, churches, associations and local communities. Rightly ordered free enterprise serves people efficiently and fairly because it creates moral agency, ownership, creativity, association, family, service and responsibility.
Man is not property of the state; he is not an instrument of the market. He is a person made in the image and likeness of God and an economy worthy of the human person must remember this and practice it.
Harden is a parishioner of St. Ambrose Church in Annandale.
